Salish Park

So now we’re at my mother’s house in Port Moody, BC, minus most of our luggage. Three of the four bags we checked in at Boston Logan have not made it here. The agent at the baggage services counter at Vancouver International said they had been sent accidentally to Halifax. That was last night. I called again today: Any updates? There was nothing. It seems I won’t have my suit to wear for the family portrait tomorrow morning at the photography studio.

In the big scheme of things there are worse things that can happen and I will forget about this. My bags were mishandled a couple of years ago when I flew Air Canada and that didn’t stop me from booking a ticket with the airline this time. But it’s still a crappy thing to be in the middle of an experience like this. I read this article at nytimes.com last month and it didn’t mean anything. It means more now.

Today I was looking at a Yashica Mat-124G at E.P Levine and while doing that I got to talking with the man behind the counter. I said I’d noticed they didn’t have cameras.com anymore. What happened? The man said the owner sold the domain name a couple of months ago for $1.5 million. The owner retired after that, sold the store to two of his employees.

A short list of photo clichés according to various sources on the Internet: parking lots, empty roads, graffiti, shopping carts, mannequins, gas stations, flowers, funny signs, eerie night photography, abandoned buildings, beds, toilets, old barns, white picket fences, shoes and feet, pretty much any subject matter shot already by William Eggleston, moody self-portraiture, color, puddles, long exposures of waterfalls and streams, water in all forms, boats, dewy spider webs, autumn leaves, sunsets and sunrises, graveyards, homeless people, suburbia, flags, dogs, children, birds, shadows, reflections, cats, airplane wings out windows, Photoshop effects, handshakes, clouds…

Keap Street between Grand and Hope, Brooklyn, NY, 2003

I spent the whole weekend in New York City and didn’t step foot in Brooklyn even once—a first.

On Saturday night I walked past the Cedar Tavern on University Place and saw that it was closed for renovation. I thought I would take a picture but there was a drunk leaned up against the wall and he looked like he was going to vomit.

From an article in the archives at nytimes.com (You have to be a TimesSelect subscriber to read it.): Robert Frank went there in 2001 and had “a drink for old time’s sake… ‘It’s all changed,’ he said… ‘Everyone looks well fed and content. Maybe I don’t belong here.’ …The waiter came by and told him he would have to leave the table if he was not going to order food.”

I graduated from university with my B.A. around the time Time magazine came out with a story titled “Bellboys with B.A.s.” One option that presented itself about then was teaching English at a language institute in Seoul, South Korea, so that’s what I did for a time before other opportunities came along. After a couple of years I returned from Seoul with a decent chunk of money that I later spent on going to art school.

That’s probably the last time I ever had any thought about when I taught English in South Korea.

Then last month a friend of my dad’s got in touch with him. This friend runs a company that places English instructors in schools around South Korea and he asked my dad if he thought I’d be interested in helping him find some English instructors. My dad thinks this is the greatest opportunity. How hard can it be? English instructors make decent pay and receive some pretty great benefits (see below). Who doesn’t want that?

As it turns out it’s not as easy as that. First of all there are now tons of companies all competing to recruit English instructors. I’d never heard of such a thing; they didn’t exist when I was there. These recruiters generally get paid KRW1.0 million per placement but it’s not like the schools would be paying this much if there were plenty of ESL teachers to go around.

Nowadays people with an interest in teaching abroad tend to go to China, it seems. It didn’t help that the exchange rate sucked for awhile when the Korean economy tanked in the late 1990s. And teaching in Korea has received some bad press, with reports of shady operations ripping off teachers, crappy working conditions, discrimination, etc. (This article at transitionsabroad.com says public schools are a great option.)

Korea has no anti-discrimination laws so it helps to be between the ages of 23 and 35 for one thing and at some point during the job application process you will have to submit pictures of yourself. In this article from a couple of years ago the writer mentions being aware of several African-Americans and British Asians who made it all the way to Korea only to be told, “Thanks but no thanks.” And there’s some other crap too.

But I can’t remember much about my own experience in Korea being negative. There was a small community of expatriates I’d come to be a part of through the school I taught at and we went out to the bars and the coffeehouses, talked about the luxuries we missed from home. I read The Bridges of Madison County and a lot of books by Charles Dickens because they were the only books available in English at the bookstore. One night my friend J and I hung out all night at a tiny club near Hongik University with a rock group from Finland called the Tuesday Girls. It was all an adventure. Tokyo was less than a two-hour flight away. Some of my friends visited Hong Kong. I wish I’d travelled more but this was back when I thought I had all the time in the world.

Rolf Potts has written about his experiences as an English teacher in Busan, Korea: on salon.com, slate.com, and travel.news.yahoo.com.

Anyway, the latest recruitment effort is as follows. It’s for public schools out in the provinces of Korea (not Seoul).

TENET Korea has won competitive bids to fill 47 ESL teaching positions at public middle and high schools throughout Jeollabuk, Chungcheongbuk and Chungcheongnam provinces in South Korea. Successful applicants for these positions will be under the employment of the respective province’s office of education according to guidelines set forth by the Ministry of Education.

Job Description

Start date: March 2, 2007
Hours: M-F, 9-5, 22 classroom hours per week
Duties and responsibilities:
- Assist Korean teachers with and/or conduct English conversation classes
- Perform duties related to English-language education
- Develop and prepare teaching materials related to English-language education

Qualifications

- Native fluency in English
- Bachelor’s degree
- Citizenship in one of the following countries: United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa
- TESOL or TEFL certification, degree in education, teaching experience desirable but not required

Salary

KRW2.0 million to KRW2.5 million (approx. US$2,175 to US$2,725) per month depending on experience plus benefits including the following:
- KRW300,000 (approx. US$325) settlement allowance upon arrival
- Fully furnished housing
- Roundtrip airfare (half reimbursed upon arrival, half paid at the completion of one year)
- 50% medical insurance in accordance with the National Medical Insurance Act of Korea
- Bonus equaling one months’ salary paid at the completion of one year in accordance with the Labor Standards Act of Korea
- 14 paid vacation days
- KRW100,000 (approx. US$108) provincial allowance plus, depending on location, KRW100,000 (approx. US$108) rural allowance

Application deadline: December 27, 2006

For more information (though as of today the English-language version doesn’t appear to be up yet): http://www.tenetkorea.com

Interested applicants can send resumes here: tenetkorea@gmail.com

Earlier this year my wife filled out a customer survey from a magazine called Lucky. She thought she was being nice. Then an issue of the magazine came in the mail and she thought that was nice. But now these “invoices” have begun arriving, informing her that a subscription she didn’t know she’d signed up for had been suspended due to nonpayment. This latest one says to send payment today to resume service and assure her “good credit standing.”

Every once in awhile we need to be reminded that companies like Condé Nast aren’t about being nice and it’s our job to keep from getting screwed over. Photographers who are not Annie Leibovitz know this; also writers.

View from the backseat of a Mercedes S430. Or maybe it was a Honda Accord… I don’t remember. The picture was taken at 4:43 pm, 12/27/05, as we went along Sperling Avenue in Burnaby, British Columbia. That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was a Honda.

The cover of the Nov. 27 issue of The New Yorker features an illustration by Chris Ware titled “Thanksgiving.” The version of the cover I got is called “Stuffing.” At the magazine’s website you can see the three other versions (”Family,” “Conversation” and “Main Course”) and an accompanying strip (”Leftovers”). You can see them on page 14 of the magazine too but on the website you can actually read what’s going on and also there’s a five-minute interview with the artist.

This is old news but new to me because for some reason my copy of the magazine didn’t arrive in the mail until this past Saturday, a few days after the arrival of the Dec. 4 issue, which contains an article on Julius Schulman.